Articles
My work has spanned subject areas, from national, state and local politics, to crime, climate change, technology, health care and my current role reporting on disinformation and domestic extremism. I've always worked on daily deadlines and supplemented my daily coverage with investigative, feature and data reporting projects that took more time and work to put together. Below is a look at some of my enterprise writing. Want to see more? Head to my contact page and let me know what you're looking for.
We received questions from readers about why the federal government and think tanks are focusing more on right-wing extremists than left-wing groups at this point in time. To answer those questions, I interviewed numerous experts and analyzed three sets of data about the prevalence of political violence among different ideologies. I also interviewed government officials about how they steer clear of looking at domestic extremism through a political lens.
Denver Business Journal |
My first cover story for the Denver Business Journal was a profile on Russell Wilson, the new Broncos quarterback whose arrival in Denver stirred excitement in the local tech startup ecosystem. I spoke with Denver venture capitalists, as well as other professional-athletes-turned-startup-investors in Colorado, including Lance Armstrong, Robin Thurston, Jeremy Bloom and Ryan Heckman. The story focused on the phenomenon of athletes making a second career out of startup investing.
Stars and Stripes |
It was brought to my attention by a veteran in New Mexico that a little-known VA policy was keeping Native American veterans from obtaining earned benefits. I traveled to the Ohkay Owingeh reservation to speak with him and other veterans about the policy and their struggles to work through the red tape to secure disability compensation and other benefits from the federal government. The story resulted in the House Committee on Veterans Affairs holding a hearing specifically to discuss issues facing the Native American community - the first time that had been done in over a decade.
Stars and Stripes |
I traveled to Kalispell, Montana, at the end of February 2021 to witness one of the first of the VA's Covid-19 vaccine clinics. I watched from the tarmac as VA providers arrived via small plane with a cooler full of the Moderna vaccine, and I saw it being administered to elderly veterans in a county fairgrounds building soon after. I interviewed veterans, many of whom were relieved to receive a vaccine after a year of Covid lockdowns. I was the first reporter granted access to one of the VA's vaccine clinics, and I learned while in Montana that a Washington Post reporter was angry about not receiving an invitation after asking for access. I got the scoop by developing good relationships with sources and asking repeatedly since the start of the pandemic for access to a clinic once vaccines were approved and distributed.
Stars and Stripes |
When the VA's flagship hospital in Washington, D.C., was found to have supply-chain issues that delayed medical procedures, I wrote a series of stories about the fallout. My biggest scoop came from obtaining internal documents from a trusted source within the department that showed the problems continued long after officials claimed they stopped. I learned from a respected DC reporter during my Paul Miller fellowship that the best way to cover a federal agency was to build trust with employees who were loyal to the Constitution, rather than whatever administration was in charge at a given time. That advice prompted me to work on my source-building, which resulted in this scoop.
Lawrence Journal-World |
The Kansas state government designated Douglas County as having a "critical" supply of affordable housing, which piqued my curiosity and drove me to report a five-part series on the county's housing crisis. I reported on city, county and nonprofit initiatives, dived into local data, mapped affordable housing in the city of Lawrence and told personal stories of families struggling because of high housing costs.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette |
The first team-reported story of my career was about the kidnapping and murder of a realtor in North Little Rock and the subsequent arrest of her killer. Because I worked the night crime shift and was the first to write about the kidnapping and join a search party, I was assigned to lead two other reporters in writing a deep-dive profile on both the realtor and her suspected murderer. This required talking to families of both the victim and the accused and scouring through court records about the suspect. It was up to me to work with designers to create various elements of the story and to make our writing cohesive. The story won two statewide awards for news feature writing.